Sixty years after Brown
LCFF advances educational equity agenda; school boards will play key role in California reform
By:
Carol BrydolfSpring 2014
Six decades after the momentous U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed “separate but equal” public school facilities, California’s Local Control Funding Formula is generating great excitement among those who believe the school financing plan is a potentially powerful new weapon in the fight for educational equity.
As local governance teams tackle their important work implementing LCFF’s combination of local governance flexibility and targeted resources, it’s instructive to consider it in the context of the hard-fought battle for equal opportunity in American public education—a campaign for equity and access that’s been defined for decades by the groundbreaking Brown decision.
In a speech to the California School Boards Association’s Delegate Assembly last December, Executive Director & CEO Vernon M. Billy urged school board members to remember the Brown decision’s legacy as they design the Local Control and Accountability Plans required to implement LCFF. Working closely with members of the local community, governance teams must write plans that explain specifically how they will invest new state money earmarked under LCFF to improve services for the students targeted for assistance: English learners, children from poor families and those living in foster care.
Billy reminded delegates that in the Brown opinion, the Supreme Court declared public education to be the foundation of good citizenship and “the principal instrument” that prepares children for success in life and work—making access to good schools “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
The Supreme Court decision, Billy continued, “still rings true today, almost 60 years later. The anniversary of Brown reminds us how important your decisions are and how they can impact future generations of Americans.”
The build-up to Brown
When the various lawsuits that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education were filed, equity was seen largely as an issue of eliminating discrimination against African-American students who were legally prevented from attending schools alongside white students.
Brown was not the first attempt by parents to integrate public schools. In Mississippi, Chinese-American parents went to court in 1927 in an unsuccessful attempt to enroll their daughter in whites-only schools in Gong Lum v. Rice. Twenty years later in California, Mexican-American parents sued several school districts in Orange County. The courts ultimately sided with parents in Mendez v. Westminster, establishing the rights of Latino children to attend white schools in California.
A great deal has changed since the nation’s highest court ruled in Brown that segregating students in different public schools “solely on the basis of race” denied minority children “equal educational opportunities” and violated the equal protection provision of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Nationally, public school student demographics have shifted significantly over the past 60 years—perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in California, where Latino children now make up the majority of all California’s public schoolchildren and an increasing percentage of children live in poverty.
What hasn’t changed is the core belief that access to quality public education is fundamental to the success of American democracy because the nation’s public schools are, in the words of one educator, “the great equalizer.” That’s as true today as it was in 1954.
School boards: Key to success
Brown v. Board of Education would have been a major case no matter how it turned out. The fact that it resulted in a unanimous decision, carefully assembled by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a cagey politician—and former California governor—added to its historic reverberation.
That resonance echoes in another California governor’s approach to education equity: Gov. Jerry Brown’s LCFF completely restructures the state’s system for financing K-12 public schools in hopes of leveling the educational playing field for some of its most disadvantaged students.
In addition to per-pupil grants for every student enrolled, the LCFF school finance plan allocates additional money to districts for services to students learning English or living in poverty or with foster parents. The formula also gives local educational agencies concentration grants if these students constitute 55 percent or more of their total student population. LCFF gives local governance teams great authority and wide flexibility—and more accountability for achieving results—than ever before.
As Billy told CSBA’s Delegate Assembly last December: “The accountability is yours. The students are yours; and you are now clearly the proverbial “them” that in the years ahead the public interest and education civil rights groups will be watching closely.”
To be sure, California’s new school funding formula and the nation’s most famous school desegregation case represent two completely different strategies for improving public education, but they are both potentially powerful educational equity strategies.
“The LCFF is a funding distribution model, but if you look at the spirit and structure of LCFF and what the governor has said about what it’s designed to accomplish, it’s clear that the LCFF is also a social justice strategy,” says Michael Lin, Ed.D., superintendent in the Corona-Norco Unified School District, which has won national acclaim for boosting achievement among Hispanic and African-American students.
“Ultimately the connection between Brown and LCFF is simple: both aimed to eliminate the achievement gap. Both Brown and LCFF are based on the premise that education is the fundamental vehicle to attain equity.”
Lin knows about public education’s equalizing value from personal experience, having arrived in the United States as a 13-year-old who relied on public schools to give him the tools to succeed in this new—and foreign—country. “My parents gave up everything to move here from Taiwan so that I could attend public schools,” he says. “I would not be where I am today without public schools.”
Vallejo Unified Schools Superintendent Ramona Bishop, Ed.D., says she also sees LCFF as a strategy that can help realize the promise of Brown.
“I certainly do think it’s an important step forward in the fight for educational equity,” she says. “The governor and Legislature have gone out on a limb to see that students who need help the most get additional money. I am just thrilled with the way the LCAP is constructed. Brown v. Board was meant to ensure that all students would have the opportunity to prosper. We have fallen short of that. LCFF gives us the opportunity to push the envelope.”
Butte County Board of Education member Michael Walsh is one of many in agreement.
“I think Brown did a good job getting the school equity conversation started, but we haven’t achieved the hoped-for results,” says Walsh, who’s also an at-large director representing county offices of education on CSBA’s Board of Directors. He clearly relishes the leadership opportunities that LCFF gives governance teams.
“I love that we’re ‘it,’” he says. “We decide how to spend the money, and we’re responsible for results. It will take a while for that vision to be fully absorbed, but I already am seeing a new level of collaboration between county offices of education, local educational agencies, community groups and parents.”
Addressing a range of student needs
For decades after Brown was handed down, most school equity advocates assumed that if children from all races and economic groups attended school together “the gaps in educational outcomes among children of different races, classes, and cultures could be closed,” notes Peter Schrag, author of “Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools.”
The goal of fully integrating public schools—and American society—has proved elusive, and there is a growing recognition that simply sending students to the same schools isn’t enough to provide them with equal educational opportunities. Children who come to school hungry, stressed or sick and those who are learning English or lack permanent homes often struggle to succeed in school and find it difficult to thrive later in life.
“I think that in the years since Brown we’ve learned a lot about all the important factors outside of school that impact a child’s ability to learn,” Schrag says.
One person who’s helped teach that lesson is Gary Orfield, Ph.D., a co-founder of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Last fall he delivered the American Educational Research Association’s 10th annual Brown Lecture in Education Research—an event so prestigious that the association keeps archives of all 10 lectures on its website.
Orfield called for a new and comprehensive civil rights agenda for public education to combat the devastating impacts of racial inequality and separation that, he said, continue to undermine equal opportunity efforts six decades after Brown.
In a recent interview, Orfield sounded optimistic when he assessed the chances that LCFF’s emphasis on allocating additional resources to support underserved children and families will make a meaningful difference. He’s hopeful that school reformers are taking a more comprehensive approach to the interventions and supports that can help children and families succeed, taking into account all the factors that impact learning.
“There does seem to be a lot more awareness of the link between social conditions and educational achievement,” he says. “There’s more recognition that things like racial isolation and poverty matter. I don’t think we’re doing enough about it, but it’s a start.”
Preschool as an equity strategy
School reformers are increasingly advocating equity strategies that address a range of student needs, establishing community schools and collaborating with nonprofit social service agencies to offer health care, expanded meal programs, family counseling and parent education—services that were not considered basic school responsibilities when Brown was decided.
Supporters of expanding early childhood education say the concept of offering universal preschool to better prepare very young children for school is being increasingly accepted as an effective equity strategy and is finally gaining bipartisan political support in California and nationally.
“We’ve spent decades talking about the importance of ensuring that low-income families and families of color have access to quality affordable preschool,” says Giannina Perez, director of early learning and development policy with the advocacy group Children Now.
“If we don’t do this, we only exacerbate existing inequities. Preschool is absolutely an equity issue. LCFF can be a blessing if more and more school districts acknowledge the importance of preschool in helping give kids, particularly low-income and English Learners, a better start.”
Advocating adequacy
Legal strategies designed to improve public education are also evolving with the times. Civil rights proponents had hoped the Brown decision would establish that public education was a right protected by the U.S. Constitution. Instead, later court decisions in subsequent cases held states responsible for providing education.
Since most states have constitutions that include equal protection provisions and require that legislatures fund public schools, advocates for education equity have returned to the courts in the years since Brown with a new argument: the so-called “adequacy” approach to public school reform.
In states across the country, public school supporters have filed a number of adequacy lawsuits in hopes of forcing legislatures to pony up the money necessary to pay for the quality public educational services mandated by their respective state constitutions.
In California, CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance led a coalition of public school supporters to file the Robles v. Wong class action lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks to compel the state to calculate the real costs of funding the public school system established in the state constitution and to allocate the money to pay for this critical state mandate. That case is making its way through the courts. In New York and New Jersey, similar cases have led to significant increases in public school funding, and both Schrag and Orfield believe that adequacy will emerge as an effective tactic in the ongoing fight for equity.
Better—but not sufficient
Although California still ranks at the bottom of the list nationally when it comes to per-pupil funding, state support for public schools is on the rise—thanks to LCFF, an improving economy and the willingness of California voters to tax themselves to preserve essential school services. Although school reformers applaud funding increases and LCFF’s focus on underserved students, no one argues that the state is allocating enough money to support all the work ahead.
CSBA General Counsel Keith J. Bray enthusiastically supports LCFF goals and is optimistic about the formula’s potential to make a real difference for kids—especially if school boards take advantage of what Bray sees is an unprecedented opportunity to do right by the children who need the most support.
“California is making an effort to put its money toward reducing the gulf between different populations of students,” he says. “It gets me a bit passionate because with LCFF we have a tool to do something about the vast inequity between different groups of students. Brown was concerned about equal facilities. This goes so much farther.”
Bray is, however, realistic about current per-pupil funding levels. “I’ve heard folks call it the ‘Local Control Underfunding Formula,’” he says. If the local control formula achieves its target funding goals, state support for public schools will merely reach 2007-08 levels by 2020-21. That’s hardly an ambitious goal, although it is a welcome change after years of cuts.
“There’s been such a disinvestment in schools,” as Orfield says at UCLA. “Districts have been so demoralized, so sanctioned and so punished.”
Going beyond NCLB: A new day?
Schools were besieged even before the Great Recession’s economic downturn, when what many conceded was a well-intended law ended up sidetracking education reforms in a misguided overreliance on test scores: the No Child Left Behind Act.
Despite NCLB’s unintended consequences, Vallejo City Unified Superintendent Dr. Ramona Bishop is among those who say the law did advance the school equity agenda in at least one sense; by requiring schools and districts to disaggregate data about performance of individual student subgroups, the law demonstrated in dramatic—even shocking—fashion the extent to which students of color, poor kids, foster children and English learners had fallen behind white and Asian students.
“It forced us to take a hard look at ourselves,” she says. “Brown was designed to promote equity and equal education. But we know there are children who will have predictable outcomes based on their circumstances. We’re not happy about that.”
Where NCLB “focused all attention on the numbers,” as Orfield says, LCFF evaluates school performance against many measures in addition to test scores. The formula requires districts to collaborate closely with parents, students, teachers and community members to design LCAPs that demonstrate how school boards will invest funds in eight priority areas that include factors like school climate, parental involvement, student engagement and course access. The plans must also show that money is being spent on services to students who generated the additional funds.
Veteran education writer John Fensterwald, editor-at-large at EdSource Today, says NCLB was itself an attempt at equity. NCLB supporters believed they could improve outcomes for underachieving students by imposing a system of strict accountability and sanctions that rewarded schools for boosting scores on high-stakes tests in core subjects.
“The idea was that you could make quality and equity happen by raising standards and holding people accountable,” says Fensterwald.
He’s pleased that LCFF takes “a more nuanced and sophisticated view of equity” by considering measures other than test scores to evaluate school quality. He says LCFF’s LCAPs also encourage local governance teams to invest in a much wider range of factors that can impact student achievement.
Bishop says she’s optimistic that by reaching out to parents and other members of the community when setting investment and program priorities—as required by LCFF—“We’ll capture subgroups that need additional help.” If school board members and administrators focus on careful planning and community engagement, and invest in evidence-based strategies for supporting underserved students, Bishop is confident that LCFF can advance the civil rights agenda in the Brown tradition.
“In the hands of knowledgeable boards that have an inclusive planning process and invest funds wisely, in the hands of leaders who are willing to go out on a limb for these students, it’s going to be a new day in California education,” Bishop asserts.
‘The right side of history’
For the promise of LCFF to be realized, however, school boards need to make sure they make the most of the opportunities for effective local control and wise investment in practical programs which the new formula provides—actions that CSBA Executive Director Billy says will put boards “on the right side of history.”
In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, Billy reminded CSBA’s Delegate Assembly last year, some school boards resisted attempts at school integration and blocked efforts to provide equal opportunities to students who needed the most support.
“Throughout history,” Billy said, school boards “have been at the center of social change.” It’s instructive and sobering, he added, to remember that in the Lum, Mendez and Brown school desegregation cases (among others) school districts found themselves “on the wrong side of history because of what they did or did not do,” just as some school boards were “on the wrong side of history” 60 years ago, as the nation awaited a decision on the Brown case.
It’s critical that school boards make decisions that “support all students and honor the principles of equity so eloquently embedded in our state and national constitutions,” he said.
“Our public education system is about creating a level playing field from which all of us can compete and co-exist. It’s about the capacity to fulfill our democracy, freely and completely engaging our rights and freedom.”
Carol Brydolf, now retired, was a staff writer for California Schools for 18 years.